


Garden in the Woods

by rlficacct



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), just a dash of world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24393277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rlficacct/pseuds/rlficacct
Summary: He escapes to the workshop and puts on music, turning it up until the specific details of the worst case scenarios can't fully form in his brain over the noise and the terror melts back to a more manageable level. Or he'll go running in the woods to give himself some sort of outlet for all the adrenaline his body is creating. He never runs too far from the cabin, though, just in case -FRIDAY mentions the unhealthy rise in his heartbeat after a fresh wave of panic sweeps through Tony, and he snaps at the AI. "You're not telling me anything I don't know, pal. Don't bring it up again unless I'm actively dying."Tony comes back to earth, runs off to the woods, and gets better.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written almost a year ago and has nothing to do with current events. However, Tony's in a pretty bad headspace off and on throughout the fic, so read with caution if you need to.

When Tony sleeps, that first week back on earth, he does so in quick snatches here and there. After arriving back on earth he only pauses to speak to the others for a few moments before grabbing a few essentials and flying himself and Pepper out to an old property in the woods - secluded, not another human within a mile, but unmistakably earthen, undeniably _home_. He dozes in the garage, at the kitchen table, in the back of the car, propped up against a tree. Sometimes Pepper coaxes him into the bed beside her and he holds her while she sleeps, awake and terrified that between one breath and the next she'll disappear.

The first couple of days he vacillates between needing to be physically touching her and not being able to be in the same room as her. He'll sit next to her on the couch while she's working, hold her hand while she's on the phone with her colleagues. He's under the impression that her network is still reeling internally from recent events, to say nothing of the outside world that they're trying to help.

He'll stay with her until it becomes unbearable - with his eyes open he worries about seeing her turn into dust in front of him, but when he shuts his eyes all he can see is Peter's last moments. He tries to focus on Pepper's words as she talks to drown out the memory of the kid's last moments, but then he starts worrying about what will happen if her voice cuts out suddenly. He'll sit with her as long as he can, then he gets up, presses a kiss to her forehead or cheek so she doesn't worry about him, and walks out of the room. He escapes to the workshop and puts on music, turning it up until the specific details of the worst case scenarios can't fully form in his brain over the noise and the terror melts back to a more manageable level. Or he'll go running in the woods to give himself some sort of outlet for all the adrenaline his body is creating. He never runs too far from the cabin, though, just in case -

FRIDAY mentions the unhealthy rise in his heartbeat after a fresh wave of panic sweeps through Tony, and he snaps at the AI. "You're not telling me anything I don't know, pal. Don't bring it up again unless I'm actively dying."

Pepper lets him have his space, but she also demands at least one meal a day with him and tries to keep him in sight as much as possible. It's not a problem - he can never stay away from Pepper for too long. Despite everything, looking at her still settles some part inside of him. And when he's gone he's constantly worried that something will happen.

Tony spends two days in his workshop crafting a bracelet for Pepper and one for himself. He sits her down to a candlelit dinner and gives her the bracelet, asks her to never take it off. The bracelet he wears vibrates slightly to the time of the heartbeat sensor in hers, and he can feel it when he presses the metal against the skin of his wrist.

Tony doesn't sleep _well_ but he does sleep. He knows he's having nightmares, but thankfully he can't remember them when he wakes up.

After breakfast that first morning, Pepper makes a list of everything they'll need to bring to the cabin. It takes several trips back to New York to grab everything.

When he first walks in to his old workshop, he has to stop because front and center is the car he'd been working on for Peter. The physical body was mostly finished and he'd been working on the car's AI. He'd been meaning to write a custom AI for the kid, personalize it. Maybe if he'd been content to just load FRIDAY onto the system, he'd have had the chance to give it to him before --

But now the car is sitting unfinished in a spot of honor in the middle of the workshop, just like -- 

and Tony can't stand thinking about it, so he throws a sheet over the car and makes it all the way to a workbench before collapsing with his hands over his face, blinking back tears.

Later he meets up with Pepper, who had been packing all their more personal items. He walks in on her crying, holding a framed photo of her and her parents from when she was a teenager. Her father had died of natural causes years earlier, but her mom had been another casualty of the snap. Tony puts his arms around her and she turns her face into his shoulder.

When they return to the cabin, the photo goes on the nightstand next to their bed. Pepper suggests that he could find a photo of his own to put alongside it. He privately pulls up Peter's Facebook profile later, scrolls down the page past dozens of posts his friends have made after his presumed death, to the posts he'd made in the last few weeks before --.

He ends up on May's page somehow and finds an account in her friends list that he's instinctively suspicious of. The suspicious account's set to private so he hacks into May's account (password security, folks, come on) and finds that it's full of photos of Peter (not Spiderman) with the Avengers. There are a couple of formal group shots but mostly they're just selfies, some posed, others of Peter's smiling face in the foreground and an Avenger or two doing something stupid in the background. Shuri's in a lot of the photos, and Tony realizes that he doesn't know what happened to her. He tries to block out the thought.

Tony's in a few of the photos, of course. He saves all of those and prints out the one Peter had posted of him "accepting the scholarship" - not the formal one, but the one where they'd been goofing off, having fun with it. Pepper has some spare frames, of course she does, so he frames it and places it on the nightstand next to Pepper's family photo.

Pepper convinces him to lay down with her that evening and she drifts off to sleep while he runs his fingers through her hair. It's been a few days since they came out to the cabin and he's better at this now; with every passing day that she doesn't disappear in his arms he becomes more convinced of her permanence. Eventually his attention is pulled away from Pepper and he stares at the photo of him and Peter, faintly visible in the light of the arc reactor. His thoughts start to spiral and the next thing he knows he's shaking and Pepper's sitting up on her elbows, turned toward him with a look of concern on her face. He opens his mouth to offer some sort of explanation or maybe to forestall any questions she might have, but nothing comes out.

"Tony, sweetheart," she starts. "I'm sorry. I know he meant a lot to you."

Tony nods, and the photo grows blurry as his eyes begin to water.

"We can take the picture down if it's making you upset."

"No," he manages. "I can't... I can't... bury him like that, I can't -" and the word triggers something in his brain and now he's thinking about whether May (is she alive?) or the kid's school friends (are they?) had held a funeral for Peter, or had they been holding out hope that he was still alive, like Pepper'd been doing for him? Someone should really try to contact his family, Tony decides, he should do that tomorrow, why hasn't he done that already? Maybe if they haven't held a funeral yet he could attend. It'd kill him inside, but it's no less than he deserves, and he should be there to honor Peter, his memory.

Although maybe his friends and family wouldn't want Tony there - after all, he is in some sense the kid's ki-

the man who's responsible for-

And he's hyperventilating and Pepper's helping him sit up and pushing his head down to his knees. She grabs the trash can and hands it to him and he grips it tight with one hand, the other over Pepper's chest as he tries to breathe along with her. His shirt is sticking to him so he strips it off after a couple of minutes and the rush of cool air against his skin helps a little to shock him out of his panicked state. Pepper goes to the kitchen and returns with a glass of water which he drinks slowly and some painkillers to knock out the headache that they both know he'll be getting shortly. She grabs some tissues and wipes off his face, throws them in the trashcan which she gently detaches from his loose grip and places right next to the bed.

"We can talk about it later," she offers, and Tony would rather not, but he's too wiped out to even respond. He sits on the edge of the bed for a couple more minutes before he slides back down to a horizontal position. Pepper turns him onto his side and curls around him, one arm slung over him and pressing against the arc reactor. He pulls the band of his bracelet tight against his wrist and focuses on Pepper's heartbeat.

The next morning when he wakes up Pepper has breakfast on the table. He can tell by her face that they're going to be having one of those conversations that he doesn't like, and he's doubly right. It starts out in the middle of the meal - 

"I really think you need to talk to a doctor and get back on your meds."

\- which isn't a complete shock after last night's events. He'd stopped taking them a while ago, and it'd seemed to go okay. Pepper had voiced concerns, but Tony's used to that. He's done a lot of kind of stupid, risky stuff, and Pepper's usually concerned, but it also usually turns out okay for him.

He hadn't even seriously considered picking the meds back up again after his return to earth. For one thing, there was the practical aspect that it was kind of hard to get a doctor's appointment right now - the 50% of doctors who remained were still busy treating the survivors of the snap who'd been injured in the aftermath (car wrecks, plane crashes, instances of gun violence in the immediate panic and other crimes as some areas descended into chaos).

But the other thing is... it's not like he feels he deserves this (although, yes, there is that too), but despite the near-constant anxiety and occasional waves of terror, he really hasn't felt like he's been overreacting. The medicine he'd been on had been meant to fix the maladaptive cycles in his brain, but everything he's been feeling has honestly felt like a rational reaction to him. He's never felt this out of control before, but world circumstances are literally the worst they've ever been, so he feels pretty justified in not... handling it well.

Pepper's using her dead-serious voice, though, and Tony really does trust her with this, so he promises to call a doctor and see about getting back on the meds.

Pepper lets him finish the rest of his meal before she pulls out the other punch by way of disappearing into their bedroom and coming out with the photo of Peter.

"It's not healthy right now for you to be staring at this constantly, not when this is so fresh.

"I know what you said last night and I'm not suggesting that you try to get rid of Peter or forget about him, but how about we do something like this," and she puts the photo on one of the upper shelves in the kitchen, "where we can see it but it's not staring you in the face."

Tony considers. The picture isn't at eye level, doesn't catch his eye at a quick sweep of the room, but when he's looking at the shelving specifically it stands out as a prominent piece. He tilts his head in acceptance and Pepper smiles at him.

His stomach is full and he's still kind of exhausted so he makes his way over to the couch and passes out. When he wakes up he can hear Pepper moving around somewhere else in the house and his phone is on the coffee table, a sticky note on it with "Call the doctor" in Pepper's handwriting. He picks up the phone but the first call he places is to May. He holds his breath as the phone rings, lets it out all in a rush when she finally answers.

(They had held a funeral for Peter two weeks after the snap, she says. She thought that she and the kids needed closure, and even though they didn't have proof that he was actually gone, she'd had a feeling. Tony tries to hold back tears as he apologizes for not being able to make it, apologizes for her loss, and she responds as if she thinks he's apologizing in the general way people do, instead of as the person responsible for --. He finishes the call quickly while he can still speak normally, doesn't correct her.)

(He calls an old doctor friend of his to consult on what medication he should be on and at what dosage. He doesn't bother asking for a script, just walks into the SHIELD infirmary and grabs what he needs. If they care, they can bill him.)

Over dinner one evening Pepper tells him her vision for a garden in the side yard, with a possible future expansion into the back if everything goes well. She's incredibly busy still but he catches her researching what kind of sunlight various plants need and how to get rid of pests naturally. They lay down together one evening with a tablet opened to a rough sketch of the grounds. Pepper asks him questions like "Where do you think the tomatoes should go?" and "What about blueberries, do you want blueberries?" and Tony responds as if he has a single opinion on anything. He's not sure where this newfound interest in horticulture came from, but he knows right off the bat that the garden will never be less than 100% Pepper's. She's not really asking because she cares what he thinks about it but because she wants to share this part of herself with him. So he just agrees with everything she suggests or turns the questions right around on her. (Except the blueberries. Pepper doesn't particularly care for them so if she grows some it'll be up to him to eat them, and just - no.)

Pepper leaves the next Saturday morning and returns with packets of seeds and tiny trees rooted in buckets, a couple of shovels and a bunch of fertilizer. She tackles the trees first and Tony watches her progress in snatches as he does laps around the grounds - the exercise is good for him. She takes breaks - it's pretty hot out - and has to run inside every once in a while due to all the water she's drinking, but by sundown she's got all the trees planted and is starting to prepare the ground for the seeds. It's not time to plant all of them yet, she explains, but he can see where the footprint of the garden will be once it's complete. Before she drifts off to sleep that night she asks him whether he'd mind working on an irrigation system for the garden, and he stays up half the night in bed beside her, looking up information on how to do that. It's not something he has any previous experience in and he actually has some fun trying to work out how to give Pepper the most well-watered plants possible.

Pepper makes an afternoon trip a few days later and comes back with all manner of gardening books. Most cover information she's mentioned to him before, and there's an honest-to-God _Farmer's Almanac_ stacked on top. He's not sure what the point is of having the physical books, but this is Pepper's project and the stack of books helps fill out their one bookshelf, making the place look even homier, so he doesn't bother to mention it.

They've settled in to a comfortable routine, now, and the cottage feels more and more like home to Tony every day. The meds are starting to kick in a bit, or maybe he's just got some distance from the... events. Either way, he's able to spend time apart from Pepper without either of them growing concerned: a few hours in his workshop here, a trip to the store there. Then there's a conference that Pepper's been asked to speak at. She'll be gone one night, maybe two, depending on how things shake out. Tony thinks he'll be able to handle it.

He thinks he does alright the first day. He's decided to work on the irrigation system while she's gone and he spends a lot of time in the workshop perfecting the program he's written to respond dynamically to changes in heat and precipitation. When he's finished he sets out to get supplies so he can start actually laying pipes, but he emerges outside only to find that it's dark out. A quick check with FRIDAY informs him that it's two in the morning. He decides he's not going to find any stores open at this hour, so he picks up a shovel, turns on a couple of lanterns, and gets started digging a path for the pipework. He finishes as the sun is peaking over the trees and he's a bit hungry so he eats a couple of power bars and passes out for a few hours.

He wakes when Pepper calls to check in with him between sessions and he chats with her while on his way to the store. He comes back with supplies and spends the rest of the day laying pipes. He decides to wait for Pepper to come back before covering everything back up, in case she wants to make any changes. He's hoping she'll be back this evening - this is the longest they've been apart in a month and he's starting to feel a little bit anxious.

Unfortunately she calls late into the evening. Things have run long, there are more attendees than they'd been prepared for, and every person they miss talking to is a person that may not donate to rehabilitation efforts. Pepper promises she'll be back home the next afternoon.

Tony tells her everything's going great and he can't wait to show her the garden. He tells her that he loves her, and through the bracelet he can feel her heart skip a beat in response.

He starts thinking about what Pepper said about donations and remembers (it's not like he forgets, but sometimes the practical applications escape him) that he's also filthy rich. He calls his secretary, who seems a bit surprised to hear from him, and asks to be transferred to whoever runs the charitable arm of his company. He's put on hold for a couple of minutes and then is on the line with a young man who refers to himself as "Tanya's replacement". The bulk of the processing power in his brain is trying very hard to not let him think of something, so what comes out is, "Yes, how much, percentage wise, of SI's yearly earnings is being donated to charity right now?" He furrows his brow at the answer. "Double that. Triple it. And I want all of it to go to rebuilding efforts for, uh. Recent events. You know." The man protests that the money's going to have to come from somewhere, and whatever department that is isn't going to cooperate. "Tell them that if they have a problem they can bring it up with Pepper." He hangs up. He rarely invokes Pepper - it's really not fair to the underlings - but he honestly doesn't have the energy right now to deal with anything.

He's still outside, so he makes his way to the bench in the back yard and sits. He's been doing a pretty good job of not worrying about it up until now, but Pepper's continued absence is starting to make him feel unsettled. It's not just the amount of time she's been gone, but also the distance between them. She's in Europe, and even if he were to use a suit, it'd still take too long for him to reach her if something were to happen. True, she's just at a conference, but that's not a guarantee of safety; people have tried to take _him_ out at conferences before... and he respects the group that Pepper works with, he really does, but how much experience do they have trying to secure an event?

He's concerned but not panicked, which he vaguely registers as progress from where he would have been a few weeks ago. He's exhausted, though, and falls asleep on the bench. He wakes up hours later to Pepper sitting beside him, looking tired and but smiling lovingly at him.

"The garden looks very nice," she greets him with.

He's so pleased to have her back that he doesn't respond, just stands up and pulls her into a hug. She lets him for a moment, then pulls back a bit and brings her hands up to his face, grazing the ends of his hair with her fingertips.

"I was going to wait to tell you, but I've got some news."

"You've... secured a huge donation and you don't ever have to do more schmoozing again?" he guesses.

Pepper smiles. "Nope."

Tony snaps a finger and points at her. "World peace. You figured out world peace."

"No, Tony," she speaks softly. "I'm pregnant. We're going to have a baby."

A baby. They're going to have a kid. Pepper's going to be such a good mom, and Tony's going to try his best, but he has no idea how to be a dad.

He spends a month reading everything he can find about how to be a good parent. He looks up how to diaper a baby, how much force to use when you're burping one, what kind of food they can and can't eat, what developmental milestones to be on the lookout for. Pepper's researching too, but not at such a frantic rate. She buys a hammock and spends a lot of time outside, either gardening or swinging gently in the shade between two trees. She gives notice to her charity colleagues that she won't be able to continue working for much longer and starts scaling back her role in the organization and at SI. Tony builds a bench wide enough for the two of them plus a little one. He consults Pepper on the placement, and she plants flowers around it.

Pepper starts to show, and he can't take his eyes off of her, although, what else is new? He finds every excuse he can to touch her stomach - a hand around her when they're dozing, hugging her from behind - eventually he gives up on trying to be subtle about it and starts reaching out whenever she's close enough. She laughs at him for it but doesn't turn him away.

Then it occurs to him that his inability to parent isn't the only potential danger to the baby, and he kind of goes overboard. Things in the outside world have calmed down somewhat over the past few months, but it still doesn't seem like a great environment to raise a child in. He mentions this to Pepper and she points out that they don't spend any significant amount of time outside the cabin grounds anymore, and this has been one of Tony's safehouses for years, a perfectly respectable place for a child. He concedes the point in theory but starts going over the security protocols with a fine-tooth comb, looking for any points of vulnerability.

Tony's always been paranoid, but this is a new sort of thing. He doubles the amount of security on the perimeter of the grounds, installs screens in every room of their house that will display the identity of anyone trying to come down the drive. He contemplates the woods for days, concerned about what could be hiding in there, and in the end just builds three separate robots specifically to patrol the area and sniff out any unwanted guests. He tracks down the current location of everyone who's ever tried to harm him and makes sure that none are still an active threat. He thinks about the Winter Soldier and he's not _glad_ that the man's gone, but at least he doesn't have to worry about him coming after his child.

He hacks into the three airports that are close to the cabin and leaves behind facial recognition software designed to alert Tony and Pepper if anyone who's tried to harm them lands at the airports. It helps him breathe a little easier.

He's not really been speaking to the other Avengers. With some distance from the events and the medication dulling some of the processes in his brain that were, maybe, contributing to Tony's state of mind when they were fighting, Tony doesn't feel anger towards most of them anymore, but neither does he want to try to reinstate broken friendships. Clint's birthday passes and Tony digs out a bow he'd been working on ages ago. He sends it to Clint via Natasha, because he's not exactly sure where the man is these days and he doesn't want to dig into the vague rumors that have started to pop up.

Steve drops by a couple of times and Tony doesn't know what he thinks he's doing. Tony brushes him off with the same carefree attitude that he uses on everyone that he doesn't want to talk to but also doesn't want to completely burn bridges with. He invites Steve in for a meal, completely drops out of the conversation and leaves the whole thing up to Pepper (it's not rude to _her_ , she actually likes him well enough), then unsubtly ushers him out the house with increasingly obvious excuses. "As pedestrian as it sounds, we're all out of clean clothes and I have to do the laundry," morphs after the second visit into "We tivo'd something and it's about to come on." - Tony's not sure whether Steve catches the inanity of the statement or whether it passes him by. Steve shows up a third time and Tony tries "The plants are supposed to be growing today and someone needs to supervise them." Even Pepper rolls her eyes at that one and takes over.

"I'm sorry, Steve, but I think we're both a little bit tired right now. Would you like a tour of the garden before you go?"

"No, but thank you for the offer, Ms. Potts. And thank you for lunch; the lasagna was lovely." With a slightly harder voice, he turns to Tony and says "Would you mind walking me out? I wanted to talk to you about something."

Tony shrugs and pushes up from the table, starts walking out the open door, leaving it up to Steve to catch up. Tony's all the way out to Steve's car before he says anything.

"So things have been pretty difficult for everyone since the snap," he begins, and Tony inclines his head, not out of curiosity but just to show he'd heard.

"I've started a support group. We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at an old YMCA. Actually it's technically two groups, but some people come to both." He stops there, as if that's the sum total of what he'd meant to say, but when Tony doesn't respond he continues. "I was wondering if you'd like to come with me next time."

"Look, Steve, as much as I'm sure people would get out of hearing me say that everything's going to be a-okay and things will be back to normal eventually, I'm kind of busy here and I don't think there's anything I can say that you haven't said already."

Steve shakes his head. "First, I think you have some fundamental flaws in your conceptualization of what a support group is, but I actually meant to ask whether you'd like to come as an attendee, not some sort of motivational speaker."

Tony laughs in his face.

"Look, pal, you are barking up the wrong tree. Additionally, this: I don't want you setting foot on my property again. Now, get out." He spins on his heals and stalks back to his house, slamming the door shut behind him. A few minutes later he hears Steve start back down the driveway.

Steve tries to come back two weeks later but Tony meant what he said so he denies access when the first cameras pick the car up, and it's good to know that their front line defenses work, at least.

Once he's taken care of immediate security concerns, Tony starts going over the failsafes he'd installed in his old projects, especially the code that runs FRIDAY and all the security measures on the property. He already keeps multiple local backups of any programs that normally run on the cloud, spread out geographically so a well-aimed blast can't take them out all at once. That part's not paranoia, just a practicality, and it's saved him more than once. But before the snap, even his worst case scenarios had all assumed that the world's general infrastructure would survive. Now he spends his days revamping his old systems so they can run as light as possible, because the smallest increase in efficiency could buy them more time. He worries about the power sources - they've got enough backup power that they can survive here for months in an emergency, using electricity only on the essentials, but that's not good enough anymore.

Tony researches solar panels - he knows the basics from when Pepper had suggested that SI make a push towards green energy, but if he's going to be outfitting the entire grounds with them himself then he's going to have to learn more. He puts panels on the roof of the house and the garage, on the insides of both buildings where there's sunlight and where he thinks Pepper will let him get away with it. He installs some in the woods next to the road leading up to their house, just out of sight from the road, and wires them up to the security systems so they'll have continuous power as long as the sun still shines.

Tony thinks about the sun _not_ shining and it's weird, because he spent the first several decades of his life knowing for certain that the sun would rise each morning, but... he doesn't have a lot of certainties anymore. He thinks of the sun gone, thinks of the apocalypse scenario where he loses Pepper and the baby (the same thing, _God_ , those are the exact same-). It'd just be him left, him and the cockroaches, both apparently fated to survive everything. He'd find Hawkeye, he decides. Find him and join him and....

The problem of how to make sure the solar panels don't eventually get covered in dirt or leaves or snow and become useless if he or Pepper are for some reason unable to clean them stumps him for a while. Eventually he builds tiny robots, multi-legged things, and programs them to check on and clean the panels if the solar intake falls beneath a certain threshold. He names them SPIDERs (Solar Power Intake Detector and Emergency Response) and releases them out into the woods.

They're programmed to swing from tree to tree on occasion as they move around, and that wasn't operationally necessary but it feels right.

One day, Tony looks at the photo of Peter in the kitchen and the twinge in his heart is sadness rather than self-loathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my head, Tony and I both call the issue that Tony's trying to fix with the solar panels The _Martian_ Problem.


	2. Chapter 2

The house slowly transforms as they prepare for the baby's arrival. Pepper buys even more books - parenting manuals, yes, but also cookbooks, first aid guides, even more gardening books. They amass a small library of picture books for the baby. They buy a crib and stick it in the corner of their room. The baby will sleep with them until it's older, they've decided, and it'll give them time to decorate the nursery to their liking.

Pepper knows whether it's a girl or a boy, but Tony wants to wait until the baby arrives. Tony works hard to convince Pepper that they should name the baby Morgan either way, and she finally agrees on the condition that she gets to choose the middle name. She chooses middle names for both a girl and a boy so she doesn't spoil the surprise for Tony.

They get prints made of the ultrasound photos. One goes in a frame on their nightstand, next to the photo of Pepper and her family.

As the due date approaches, they start making final plans for the birth. Tony suggests bringing doctors onto the property so Pepper can give birth at home, but if something goes wrong the nearest major hospital is too far away to do them any good, and Pepper admits that she'd feel more comfortable with that safety net. So two weeks before her due date, they pack their bags and move to a rented house close to the hospital they've chosen to wait for the baby's birth. Tony's never far from Pepper. They've asked Happy to come with them and he stays in the guest room.

A package arrives at their doorstep one day. Tony scans the contents before opening it - they hadn't ordered anything, but it's addressed to both of them - but it doesn't appear to contain anything dangerous. Tony still makes Pepper move to the opposite side of the house while he opens it.

The first thing he sees is a card, which he glances at just long enough to spot a signature - it's actually signed by several of the Avengers - before moving on to the rest of the contents. It's a full care package: on the top is a tiny Iron Man onesie for the baby that Tony vaguely remembers from an old Avengers merch line, but everything else is gifts for him and Pepper. There's a couple bottles of lotion, a pair of really nice slippers in Tony's size, matching "World's Greatest Mom" and "World's Greatest Dad" thermoses, a huge bottle of bubble bath, two face masks, and an incredibly soft blanket.

He calls Pepper back in after rifling through everything and lets her take a look while he goes back to the card. It's a generic congratulations card, and between the text on the card and the signatures, Natasha added a standing invitation to visit once they're settled into a routine. It's a nice enough gesture, but Tony's going to ignore it. He places the card back in the box with the other stuff, though, so Pepper can read it. If she wants to go visit them, he'll make it happen.

Pepper wants him in the room with her for the delivery. It hurts to see her in pain despite the drugs they've got her on and he's terrified the whole time that something's going to go wrong, even though the doctors seem to think the whole thing is fairly routine. The worry must be obvious on his face, or else all dads feel the same, because one of the nurses makes a joke about offering him a sedative as well.

When Morgan's not feeding, she's crying. Sometimes she's very ambitious and tries for both at the same time. 

They're discharged from the hospital quicker than Tony is entirely comfortable with, but Morgan and Pepper are both doing fairly well and they're taking up much-needed space, and Tony can't argue. Happy drives them back home. Morgan's in the middle back seat with Tony and Pepper on either side. Pepper had the foresight to bring pillows, and she's asleep against the window. Tony keeps watch over Morgan, unable to stop himself from gently running his fingers over her tiny arms and legs. He's counted her fingers and toes already but he does so again - still all there - and marvels at how incredibly small they are. He's never been around a newborn before, and he can't believe how compact she is.

Morgan's face is scrunched up even in her sleep, and she's making disquieted noises that haven't quite escalated to cries. So far in Tony's acquaintance with her, that's signaled that it's time to hand her off to Pepper and see if she's hungry, but Pepper's asleep and they're in a moving car with at least another hour left before they reach home. Tony looks at her upset expression and sighs. He puts his hand over her chest - she's so small that it completely covers her torso - and says "Me too, kiddo. I know how that one feels."

Morgan opens and closes her mouth a couple of times, then her eyes open. She cries a little bit, not the full-blown wailing that she's proven very adept at but more like she just wants to make sure everyone knows she's put out by her current situation.

"Yeah, I totally understand, baby. But let me tell you something. If you keep crying like that, your mom's going to wake up and she'll probably blame me for it."

Morgan quiets down a little bit, and Tony is not the kind of guy to abandon an experiment that's producing results, so he continues.

"You want to know why? Because you are much cuter than me. And also we've got all these hormones and shit going on in our brains telling us that you're the coolest thing since sliced bread, that's basic biology for you, but your mom's got a lot of experience in me being the one who messed up in any given situation. She's going to default to that."

Morgan doesn't stare at him - he thinks that she doesn't have the physical ability to intentionally look anywhere in particular yet - but he feels like maybe she's listening to him.

"Also, I can only blame so many things on you before Mom starts to catch on, and I should probably save it for something important."

Tony keeps talking and it calms Morgan some, but more than likely she's actually hungry and he can't do anything about that, so he has to wake Pepper eventually. Happy pulls into a parking lot while Pepper feeds her, and Tony gets out of the car to stretch his legs. Once Morgan's done, Pepper hands her off to Tony to burp her and goes right back to sleep. Tony ambles around the parking lot with her on his shoulder, patting her back and talking to her in a low voice. Eventually she does burp and settles down a little bit. Tony carries her back to the car and triple-checks that he's got her buckled into her carseat properly. Thankfully she sleeps through the rest of the ride home. Tony talks to her off and on for the rest of the ride back to the cabin even though she's asleep.

When they're finally parked in the driveway, Happy turns around and cranes his neck so he can see her over the top of the car seat. He'd been delighted when Pepper had handed Morgan to him during their official introduction after their discharge from the hospital. He'd already seen her plenty, as Tony had facetimed him multiple times during their hospital stay and babbled at him to reduce his anxiety. Happy is clearly destined to be the secretary of the Morgan Stark Fanclub, Tony and Pepper as founding members. He reaches his hand back and catches Tony's eye for permission before running a finger over the sparse hair at the top of her head. "Welcome home, Morgan," he tells her.

Morgan's small and perfect and Tony can't believe she's real sometimes. She's awake at all hours and Pepper jokes tiredly that it's Tony's genes coming out but he looks at Morgan and sees Pepper. He hopes that a tendency towards the occasional all-nighter is the worst part of him she'll inherit.

She's very fussy the first few weeks. Tony talks to her to calm her down, and it works better than most other things they've tried. He walks around with her and narrates everything that's going on. They take trips outside and he points out all the wildlife that comes through the garden. She's not old enough to understand what's happening yet, or to even clearly see everything that he's describing, but it helps calm the both of them down.

Pepper gets tired of the microwavable meals and cereal they'd been living off of since the tail end of the pregnancy so Tony tries his hand at cooking. There have been large portions of his life where he's solely eaten junk food and takeout, so it's not something he has much experience in. He and Pepper sit down with the recipe books and pick out meals for him to try. Sometimes Pepper stays with him in the kitchen while he's cooking and gives him tips, but he's also pretty good at following the recipes himself, even though he keeps having to look at the back of the cookbook to remember what sautéing means. He always tastes the results before he feeds them to Pepper, and occasionally he sets out intending to cook something that doesn't turn out right and comes back with something quick and easy. He's got pancakes down to a science.

Morgan gets strong enough to hold her head up steadily, and Tony starts taking her with him when he runs. He straps her into a carrier against his chest as the ground is too uneven to navigate a stroller at speed. They go out in the early mornings when the sun's not too high, and sometimes they take a walk in the evenings to calm Morgan down if she's being fussy. Tony's invited Pepper along on their evening walks but she's never taken him up on the offer. She says it's Tony's bonding time with Morgan and she doesn't want to interfere. Tony thinks she just wants the extra napping time.

One morning when they're in the middle of a run, Tony's phone blares with a security alert - someone's in the air above the property, on a trajectory toward the house. The alert comes with a live feed of the intruder displayed above the results from a facial recognition scan cross referenced with a database Tony'd put together. Aside from a couple instances where local kids who'd been playing in the woods had wandered over the property line, there haven't been any strangers on the premises since the last time Steve had tried to stop by. The sudden activation of the rarely used alert system is enough to send Tony into a panic, and it takes him several long seconds of running for shelter in the trees to realize that the name and face displayed on the alert belong to Rhodey. Tony takes a moment to catch his breath and calm Morgan down - the alarm had startled her - before turning around and jogging back to the cabin.

By the time he gets inside, Rhodey's already settled on a couch sipping a glass of water. Pepper's sitting in the \rocker across from him saying something, but she pauses her story once she sees Tony come in.

Rhodey stands up, sets the glass on an end table, and approaches Tony with his arms stretched out.

"Hey Tony, long time no see. How's it been?"

Tony forestalls the incoming hug with a finger in the air and the explanation of "hang on - baby", deposits Morgan in Pepper's lap, and turns around to face Rhodey again. He's immediately crushed as Rhodey's arms wrap around him, and Tony hugs him back with just as much enthusiasm. 

"Really, though, how have you been?" Rhodey asks, so Tony introduces him to Morgan, who he's immediately taken with. He asks if he can hold her and bounces her around gently on his lap while Tony and Pepper describe all the projects they've been working on around the house recently. Morgan, usually a smiley baby, is staring very seriously at the stranger holding her.

"So what brings you to our place?" Tony asks finally. "Something going on?"

"Nothing like that," Rhodey replies. "It's been, what, two years since I've seen you, and I decided it was time to start dropping by again. I've missed you."

"So you're planning on coming back, then?" Pepper asks.

"If that's alright with you." It's a response to Pepper's question, but he's looking at Tony when he says it.

"That's fine by me. Just - the house is an Avenging-free zone. So we can't talk about-"

"Tony, we've been friends since long before that; I think we can find some other things to talk about."

Pepper invites him to stay for dinner, but Rhodey says he's got something planned that afternoon and has to leave. He gives Pepper and Tony another hug, and promises Morgan that "Uncle Rhodey" will be back next time with presents for her.

Rhodey keeps his promise. Morgan's room fills up with even more toys than Tony and Pepper had originally intended to spoil her with. Most of them are at least educational, so Tony can't even yell at Rhodey for rotting his daughter's brain. He also buys her Iron Man themed clothing - mostly tshirts, but also a pair of pajama pants with little Iron Man helmets patterned all over. Pepper doesn't like it when Tony dresses her up in Iron Man outfits, but Tony gets a real kick out of it. Pepper wouldn't stoop so low as to "accidentally" stain a gift, but she's very quick to get rid of those particular articles of clothing once Morgan outgrows them. Tony complains to Rhodey, who comes by with the same clothes a size or two bigger. This is one of the many reasons why he's Tony's best friend.

Tony's in his workshop one day when Pepper walks in with Morgan in her arms. Morgan's crying and saying "dadadadadada" between sobs.

"She wants you," Pepper says, with an indulgent smile.

Tony's got grease on his hands so he wipes them off hastily before taking her and bouncing her a little bit. "Hey, what's going on Morgan?" he asks. "Is Mom making you eat carrots again, is that what's bothering you?"

"I think she just misses you," Pepper guesses. "You've been out here for a while."

Tony loses track of time, sometimes.

Morgan's wiggling in his grasp, reaching for a half-finished project he'd been working on. Tony pulls her back more firmly to his chest. "Nope, kiddo, not for you. That's for people with fine motor skills only."

Pepper's taking a look around the workshop. "You're going to have to toddler-proof this when she gets older, you know. She's going to want to spend time here with you."

Tony looks around at everything in the workshop. He hadn't bothered to try baby-proofing it at all when they'd done the work on the house. Some of it is fine for Morgan to be around, but a lot is potentially hazardous, especially considering how curious she is becoming. Tony grew up hearing stories about what he'd been like as a toddler, and shudders at the thought of trying to keep Morgan safe around some of the components he has lying around.

(And, less importantly, his things safe from _her_ \- if she didn't start dismantling things to see how they worked before her fourth birthday, he'd eat his hat.)

In the end, Tony ends up taking most of the volatile projects back to New York. It's not like he's got actual project goals or deadlines these days; he's just tinkering for fun. Anything that he really wants to finish that can't be stored at the cabin, he can pick up again when Morgan gets older.

He decides to drive back to the cabin in the car he'd been working on for Peter. There's a lot of empty floor space now that he's cleaned out the workshop, and he feels like maybe he's in a better mindset now to put on the finishing touches.

Tony makes a tiny workbench for Morgan. The workshop has one wall that's devoted to storage and he places the bench there and fences it in so she can't get out. He relocates the contents of the drawers that are within her reach and fills them up with more child-friendly tools and components. She's starting to climb now and he's worried that she'll climb over the fencing while he's focused on something, so he situates Dum-E near her and trains him to grab her by the back of her shirt and place her back on the workbench if she gets out.

He starts Morgan off with a wrench on the theory that it's the thing she's least likely to puncture or give herself a concussion with. He sands down some boards, affixes some bolts onto them, and gives her some nuts that she can practice taking on and off. They work side by side in the workshop. Sometimes she'll bring her crayons and draw while he's working. The first time he designs something based off one of her drawings, she's ecstatic. She drags Tony along as she runs to show Pepper - "Look, Mommy! Robot!"

Pepper takes it when Morgan holds it out to her and turns it around in her hands. It's small, most of it consisting of a spherical head, where Tony had done a passable job of imitating a two-year-old's rendition of a face. The head connects to a square base where two rows of tracks on the bottom substitute for wheels, protruding just slightly from the base. On the other end of the sphere, two cat-like ears poke up from the top. The whole thing is painted a bright pink.

"It's Bubblegum!" she tells Pepper. She'd named the robot immediately upon being presented with it in the workshop. She pronounces it _buh-buh-guh_ , which Tony thinks is adorable.

"What's it do?" Pepper asks, handing it back to her.

"I don't know," Morgan replies, unconcerned. She drops it on the ground and begins rolling it around the floor. Pepper winces at the sight of the robot hitting the ground, but Tony wouldn't build their toddler something that could be easily broken. Over the next few hours Pepper and Tony watch as Morgan figures out all the features of her new toy. It comes when she calls it, makes a purring noise when she plays with the ears, and its eyes give off a soft glow in the dark.

Morgan spends the next three days studiously drawing "blueprints" for Tony to design more robots from. Tony'd be perfectly happy to design a whole fleet of tiny weird bots for her, but Pepper likely wouldn't appreciate it, so he tells her that he can only build one more right now and she has to pick the best design. Morgan doesn't agree. She thinks she should have as many robots as she wants. Tony compromises, telling her that she can have one more "outside" robot for the house, and if she designs something really special, he'll make her another one to live in the workshop with them.

Morgan draws four, in the end, and Tony makes all of them for her.

Pepper plants some blueberry bushes. Morgan likes them and when Tony cooks her pancakes he folds the berries into the batter.

They have a security scare shortly after Morgan's second birthday. It's not the overt assault that Tony had been worried about and thus fully prepared for when Pepper was pregnant and during the first few months of Morgan's life, but rather something that Tony (and Pepper, as she is quick to remind him; he's not the only one to blame for missing this one) had failed to anticipate, which in some ways is even more terrifying.

Tony's outside with Morgan. They're racing trucks around in the dirt. He's just won the latest round and they're about to go again when a call comes through his earpiece from SI's Chief of Security. "I've just gotten off the phone with someone who says his friend just sold details about your daughter to a celebrity rag," he starts without any preamble. "I've got someone on the phone right now trying to track down whoever at the 'company' is in possession of the story, see if we can stop it before it gets out."

"About my _daughter_?" Tony's voice and heart are both like ice. He falls on the ground from where he'd been kneeling, frozen.

"From when she was born. The lady was one of the nurses. Like I said, we're working on getting more information, but the man I spoke to was under the impression that there weren't pictures or anything more than basic details. He did know her by name, though."

Tony scoops Morgan up and carries her into the house to find Pepper. "Keep me updated - can you keep me on the line?" He gets a response in the affirmative and mutes his end of the conversation so he can explain to Pepper, who'd taken Morgan from him and is already on edge from his tone of voice.

In the end, they're able to stop the story before it goes to print mostly due to a lucky break. The nurse had only spoken to one writer at the magazine who, because of some internal feud at the company, had sat on the story long enough for them to offer her a job at a better paying and more prestigious publication through some of Tony's contacts in exchange for her silence.

The nurse herself hadn't acted out of particular malice but rather desperation. Her girlfriend, Rach, was sick and they were having trouble paying for treatment. Tony and Pepper are able to deal with the situation neatly: a complaint filed with the hospital results in the nurse's dismissal; a discussion with the woman herself ensures she knows that they'll make things worse for her at whatever job she finds next if she tries the same stunt again. Pepper pulls money from her personal savings to help Rach and even has a face-to-face meeting with her. Rach feels bad enough about her girlfriend's actions to apologize profusely to Pepper, but evidently not enough to break up with her.

After the situation is dealt with, Tony and Pepper release the story on their own. They choose a couple photos of their family from when Morgan was a baby, hopefully nothing that will let people extrapolate what she looks like now. It helps that her hair has gotten darker as she's aged. They pick photos where her eyes are closed so nobody will know their color. They write up the most boring press statement they can manage and publish it without fanfare.

They pepper in misinformation with zero compunction. Pepper adds in the patently false detail that they call Morgan by her middle name to try to reduce the chance of a successful kidnapping while she's too young to be wary of strangers. Their disappearing act after Tony'd come back to earth had been nearly total and as far as they can tell, nobody's picked up on the fact that Tony and Pepper Stark live in their neck of the woods, so they drop hints in the article that they're splitting their time between New York and California and hope for the best.

Tony's back in a full-blown paranoia spiral for a while, during which he cooks up his own web crawler (he tries and fails to come up with a good Spiderman related name, so he mostly just settles for adding in a mental ' _heh, spiders, gettit?_ ' every time he talks about it) to try and catch any mentions of himself or his family. Pepper walks the line between sharing in his paranoia and trying to engage him in practical consideration of the topic. Her main point is that if Thanos hadn't happened to the world, Morgan would have been born to two very public figures and would have been a full-blown celebrity kid. Tony would have been posting videos of her on social media all the time. Pepper probably would have taken her to work with her. They would have taken her out to do and see things in NYC around thousands of other people without a second thought.

And the thing is, she's right, but it doesn't matter. It's a fictional world she's considering, and fictional Tony doesn't have the same paranoia that him-Tony does. He and his fictional counterpart are two different people with two different life experiences and who lives in two completely different worlds that have different dangers in them, so he feels pretty justified in his feelings.

It's too late for them to completely switch their identities - the people in town don't know them as the Starks, but they do know them as Tony and Pepper. So he sets up credit cards and IDs for them under a different last name and hopes it will be enough.

They get Morgan a computer and teach her how to use it. She's a fairly quick study - she's been allowed on Pepper or Tony's tablets for the occasional game so she seems to have the basics down. Tony puts a hefty web filter on the laptop and lets her run wild with it. She spends several days drawing pictures and sending them to Tony and Pepper's numbers instead of actually getting up and showing the drawings off to them. The laziness alarms Pepper a little bit but Tony thinks it's hilarious.

Then one day Morgan runs into the workshop with her computer and thrusts it at him urgently. "Daddy can fly?" she asks.

Tony looks at the screen to see old footage of test runs he'd done with the Iron Man suits. "How'd you find that?" he asks, intrigued. This video isn't online anywhere - she's pulled it up from their home system somehow.

"I play game. Find things. Daddy can fly?"

"Yeah, Daddy used to be able to fly. He doesn't anymore, though. What's the find things game? Can you show me?"

Morgan makes a disgruntled face, as if Tony should already know what the find things game is, and pulls up the file explorer. It's currently displaying the contents of a very small USB that Tony hadn't noticed was plugged in to the side of the laptop. A glance at the file names tells Tony that it's one of the drives he'd used to store footage of his more disastrous attempts at testing the armor - he'd wanted to keep the logs in case he needed them in the future, but he hadn't wanted Pepper to accidentally stumble upon them if she was looking for something else. Tony'd gone through a lot of trial and error in creating the suits, and he didn't want to worry her retroactively with some of the riskier things he'd done in pursuit of figuring the suit out.

Thankfully it doesn't look like Morgan had gotten very far into the test footage before she'd come to find Tony, and it sounds like this was the first video of that type she's found. Tony ejects the drive and holds it out in front of her. "Okay, kiddo. Where'd I leave this that you found it, huh?" Morgan doesn't answer him, and he sighs. "I guess I should just be thankful you didn't eat it... How's this. We'll get you your own flash drive, and you can put whatever you want on that. But no more plugging strange devices into your computer, okay? That's just bad security practice." Morgan nods at him seriously, although it's probably more at his tone of voice than out of any actual agreement.

Morgan turns three and they get her a cake and balloons and presents, but the thing she's most excited about is their trip to the lake.

There's a stream that runs just off the property line and they've taken her to play in it before, but it's not anywhere near deep enough to swim in, even if you're just two years old and a couple feet tall. Tony had to search around a bit to find a lake clean enough that Morgan won't get sick if she accidentally swallows water, but thankfully there's one relatively close by. Tony and Pepper carry her in with them until they're far enough out that the water is about chest height and play around with her while she gets used to the water. She's been practicing holding her breath in the bathtub for the past couple weeks so they repeat the lesson before starting her out on floating. She's doing a pretty good job until some older kids show up at the opposite side of the lake and start playing loudly, catching her attention, and then she's only interested in trying to go play with them.

"No, baby," Pepper tells her. "We don't know them, and they're bigger than you."

"You're bigger," Morgan protests.

"Sometimes older kids don't know how to play with younger kids," Pepper explains. "It might not be safe for you to play with them."

"But I want to!"

"You have to learn how to swim before you can play with the big kids," Tony tells her. "Why don't we practice floating some more today, and if you're not tired maybe we can work on kicking."

Morgan's not happy about that but she lets it go and pretty soon she's learned how to float all by herself.

Pepper puts Morgan on her back and together they chase Tony around the lake. They "catch" him, and then it's Tony's turn to take Morgan and run after Pepper. Morgan keeps yelling at him to run faster, but he slows down even further to make her giggle.

Once they've worn her and each other out, they head back home for a picnic. Morgan eats quickly and then curls up right on the blanket for a nap. Pepper gestures Tony inside and they leave Morgan there - she'll come inside when she's awake. The windows in the kitchen are open and the pleasantly warm air flows through the house with the wind.

"We need to start talking about school again," Pepper says.

They'd had a discussion about it briefly when Pepper was still pregnant, but they hadn't come to a consensus and had agreed to wait and see how things went.

"I still think she should be home schooled," Tony says. "She's already ahead of where the other kids her age are, and that gap will only get bigger as she gets older. There's no point in having her re-learn everything."

"She needs the social skills. We're essentially the only people she's got relationships with, and that's not healthy. Just because we'd rather stay here at the cottage doesn't mean that's what's best for her."

"I don't like the look of the schools around here." Tony had been keeping an eye on the surrounding cities, even if he didn't usually bother to actually leave the property. Things were better than they'd been in the first few months after the snap, but the area they were living in was rural and the residents were gruffer than he felt comfortable with.

"I know they're not up to your standards," Pepper responds, which wasn't what he'd been talking about, but - "I've actually been thinking... Tony, maybe we should move back west."

Tony stares at her, gobsmacked. This had never been something they'd talked about. He'd thought they were on the same page with this, keeping to themselves on the cottage property and.... It was morbid to say he'd assumed he would die here someday (far into the future - he had to stick around and see Morgan grow up and -) but death had been hounding him for decades now, and he had thought this was a good place to hide from it.

Pepper knows him. She'd learned to read him ages ago and her skill had only improved in the years since, which is great because he doesn't think he can say any of that out loud, but he absolutely needs her to understand it. He can see the sympathy in her eyes and he winces.

"It's what's best for her," she says, and goddamn if that isn't the one argument that'll get him to give in to anything. Tony nods. He can face civilization again if he has to, for her.

"So what are you thinking, start packing everything up now and what, move back to our old place in New York? Because if so we should probably go ahead and call the cleaners, there has to be inches of dust on everything in there. Or we could re-build on the Malibu property? Make it less conspicuous this go around so maybe it won't get flattened next time we get attacked?"

Pepper gives him a look. "Don't pull that with me, Tony. I'm not trying to fight you here," which he knows in his head but it's going to take a while for the rest of him to catch up. "I wasn't thinking any time soon."

Pepper lays out the timeline for him - keep the family here for another couple of years and move back west a few months before Morgan's set to start first grade so she has time to get adjusted. They'll make sure that she's covered everything she should learn in kindergarten - Tony's correct that she'll be vastly ahead of the rest of her classmates in most subjects, but they'll look into the curriculum to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. Pepper will start researching private schools now, although they really could save that for later - she doubts that they'll have to deal with waiting lists.

Tony listens and nods, and when he looks out the window he can see a tiny pair of eyes peeking in, brown hair covering ears that he's sure are intently listening to everything Pepper's saying.

He sits Morgan down one day and swears her to secrecy, then pulls up a website he's been looking at recently that sells custom jewelry. He lets Morgan pick something out for herself, then asks for her opinion on necklaces for Pepper. For herself, she picks a bracelet that had caught her eye by virtue of having the most differently colored gems in it. She and Tony have some creative differences over what to get for Pepper, but in the end they decide on a silver necklace with three dangling rubies.

When the jewelry arrives at a PO box they keep in town, they make a day trip out of going to pick it up. They start out with a stop at McDonalds for cheeseburgers then hit the downtown. Morgan's fascinated by all the buildings and keeps exclaiming "so tall!" every few minutes. Morgan's been in the city before, but only twice, and it's been a while so everything seems new to her. Tony feels a bit bad that she's not been away from their home much, but she's still so young - there'll be time for her to get used to the outside world later. They do a lot of window shopping as they make their way through the streets. Their final destination is a toy store that he and Pepper have shopped at before but that Morgan's never visited. She picks out some building block-like magnetic tiles and in a fit of nostalgia Tony grabs an etch-a-sketch as well. They stop by the PO box on the way back and he gives Morgan her bracelet. He'd had the back side engraved with the letters PTM inside a heart.

When they get back home Morgan rushes to show Pepper the day's spoils, and Pepper oohs and ahs over everything. Then, just like Tony'd coached her, she says, "And we got something for you, too!"

"Oh, what is it?"

Morgan runs back to Tony and takes the box that the necklace came in. She presents it to Pepper, who opens the box and lifts the necklace out. "It's beautiful," she tells Morgan, and then looks at Tony. "Help me put it on?"

Tony moves behind her and starts fiddling with the clasp. "It's actually for a special occasion," he says as he moves her hair to the side so he can fasten it.

"Oh? And what's that?"

Morgan's jumping up and down with a huge grin on her face, but she's not blurting anything out even though he'd gone over everything with her before ordering the jewelry. Tony finishes fastening the necklace then steps back in front of Pepper, takes her hands, and kneels down.

"I tried this once before, but then our lives got kind of busy... Pepper Potts, will you marry me?"

Pepper's grip on his hands squeezes tight and she nods, her smile wobbling just a bit at the corners.

"You have to say yes!" Morgan exclaims.

"Yes, Tony, of course I will."

Morgan screams happily and throws herself at them; Pepper catches her and sinks down until they're on level with Tony. Tony envelops them both into a hug, indescribably happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you so much for reading!


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